Saturday, August 17, 2013

Notes from the Home - August 17, 2013

Tuesday morning at quarter of eight, my
wheelchair died. The chair had been difficult to rouse when I roused myself
around five that morning. But rouse it I did, and all seemed in order as it
carted me from bed to bathroom to the refrigerator to the table. The chair sat
patiently while I ate breakfast, did the LA Times and USA Today crossword
puzzles on line, and then checked out huffingtonpost.com, along with the
on-line editions of the Star Beacon,Post-Gazette and Plain Dealer. And when
asked, the chair took me to the kitchen sink, the coffee maker and the bathroom
without hesitation or difficulty.

At seven-twenty, I set out for my morning
inspection of the Covenant Woods’ grounds. On my way down the hall, however, I
was unable to get the wheelchair out of P1, its slowest speed. I stopped and
pressed the button several times, to no avail. I went on, and at the door I
pressed the button again, and again the chair did not respond. Outside, the
clouds hung heavy and low, and the wind whispered, “If you come out, you best
be prepared to make a mad dash when the rain starts.” Being prepared to dash
madly is one thing, madly dashing in P1 is another, and I opted to return to my
apartment to give the wheelchair time to adjust its attitude.

Back in the room, I pulled up to the
computer, shut off the chair and pretended to write for a few minutes. But I
didn’t want to write; I wanted to go outside. That’s when the wheelchair, in
the manner of all the women I’ve ever known, failed to respond to my efforts to
turn it on. And like those women, the chair snickered contemptuously when I
tried again and again to get some action.

So, there I was, at the table, sitting in a
power chair that hadn’t any power. The first order of business was to call
Convalescent Care, a local concern that, among other things, services
wheelchairs. Finding the number wasn’t a problem; I’d put it in the phone a few
months ago, when the chair first exhibited its disagreeable feminine attributes.
My call was answered by a machine that told me the slug-a-beds at Convalescent
Care don’t show up for work until eight-thirty.

The next order of business was to get away
from the table and into my manual wheelchair. I disengaged the wheels and used
my feet to push me and the chair backward until I ran into the bed. From there,
a lengthy stretch enabled me to grab my walker, which enabled me to get up and
pull my manual wheelchair from its place between the file cabinet and the
bookcase. My mechanical ineptitude and physical limitations combined to make a
ten-minute chore out of the thirty-second job of setting up the chair. With the
chair in a ploppable shape, I plopped into it and waited until eight-thirty to
call Convalescent Care again. Kevin said he’d send one of his lackeys over,
probably around ten-thirty, with a new control unit.

The lackey showed up shortly after eleven.
In his late twenties or early thirties, and a pudgy five-eleven, he had the
look of a man who’d been eschewing exercise since his career as a third-string
lineman for his high school football team ended. And after two or three minutes
of less-than-strenuous labor, he sounded like it too. He rasped, he gasped and
he wheezed for a minute or more before announcing that he would take the chair
to his van and replace the control unit. Had the NSA been listening to my
breathing after I bumbled about getting the manual wheelchair and compared it
to the lackey’s, it would have concluded that I am by far the superior physical
specimen. But the lackey had a job to do, and he did it. The wheelchair is
working again.